Creation of dynamically generated contents relying on vocal synthesis to support the development of written skills. – PHOREVOX

PhoReVox is a multidisciplinary project whose objective is to provide a tool to help learners develop written skills in French thanks to the use of speech technologies. Technological solutions to assist language learning, and more particularly written French, remain mostly confined to exercises based mainly on the use of written forms (MCQ, keyboarding words, pictograms). We think that an oral interaction can lead to greater control of the written forms of language. a wide range of pedagogical exercises covering different stages of language acquisition will be provided : phonological discrimination tasks, exercises such as dictation of words or phrases, work on punctuation and word order, work on French liaisons and its relation to speech style, etc. All these exercises will in the end seek to help learners develop the skills necessary to produce free written texts.

To reach the project objectif, five areas of innovative research will be explored:
-Offering voice synthesis of high quality. Accepting and understanding the exercises depend on it. Models of French prosody adapted to different forms of exercises will have to be defined.
-Defining types of exercises that can be used to work on specific language skills in different learning modules.
-Providing a tool able to vocalize exercises and collect the learner's answers on a kind of Web 2.0 platform.
-Monitoring skill profiles. A major challenge consists in automating the collecting process of these indicators. The collected data should be analyzed automatically.
-Providing a tool able to create exercises automatically according to the learner's profile.

The quality of speech synthesis is crucial. The synthetic voices should keep the learner's attention alive and correspond to what is expected for the proposed activities. Up to now, no speech synthesis system can, for example, say a poem or a nursery rhyme convincingly. The exercises must be tailored to the learners' needs. On this point, managing learners' profiles and generating content automatically are fundamental.
This project brings together complementary actors whose aim is to provide within two years a prototype that will be tested both with "cycle 2" primary students and A2-B1 level learners of French as a foreign language. The CREAD, a research centre on education, learning and didactics, will participate with the LLF, a Formal Linguistics Laboratory located at Paris Diderot University, and ZEUGMO company, specialized in learning spelling, to the specification of the contents included in the exercises and ensure the implementation of field experiments. Voxygen company will provide a speech synthesis technology adapted to the objectives of the application, in particularly in terms of new models of prosody associated to dedicated voices. The Cordial research team, which is part of IRISA, will manage the implementation of computational models related to the prosodic specifications defined by LLF as well as take part in the automatic generation of contents for the exercises. An innovative part of the project seeks indeed to reinforce the learner's autonomy. A profile is elaborated based on the results obtained by the learner to various exercises. The learner's profile is then used to provide him with a set of exercises, which can be generated automatically, focused on his main difficulties. The implementation of a demonstration prototype will be integrated into the platform "Orthodidacte.com" provided by ZEUGMO company to help learners acquire spelling skills.